Foster’s Freeze:
Closing of Menlo Park store to end chain’s presence on Peninsula
Closing of Menlo Park store to end chain’s presence on Peninsula.
The last soft-serve vanilla goop is about to gush out of the Foster’s Freeze machine in Menlo Park, and the loyal customers — a dwindling but determined bunch — are getting softer and squishier about the whole thing than a Foster’s cone in a heat wave.
It could be the end of an era, except that humble Foster’s Freeze was never the kind of fast food chain that eras were made of. But it’s the end of something.
The Menlo Park franchise at 580 Oak Grove Ave. will shut down forever on Wednesday. A big retail development is coming and Sung Lee, who has run the stand for more than three decades, is going.
“I’m sad, but I can’t cry all day,” said Lee. “I feel like crying, but it doesn’t make any difference. Either way, we’re closing.”
A couple of car dealerships that used to supply noon customers shut down. Then nearby MenloA-therton High School changed its lunch policy and no longer allowed students to leave campus. And perhaps tastes changed, too, and Foster’s — with its goofy, smiling cone logo and its worn-out graphics and neon-tube sign — belonged to another time.
The Menlo Park store is the last of its kind on the Peninsula: Its demise will leave nary a Foster’s Freeze between San Jose and Santa Rosa.
For weeks, ever since Lee posted the announcement in the front window, customers have been dropping by for a final Foster’s hit. They said they would miss the place.
Jerry Evans bought a chocolate shake for $2.99. He said it tasted just like the chocolate shake he bought half a century ago from a Foster’s Freeze when he was a kid in Sioux City, Iowa — for a lot less than $2.99.
“Exactly the same,” he said, taking a slurp to double check. “That’s consis-
tency. Not a lot of that around.”
There has been a Foster’s at the Menlo Park location since 1950. Lee, who came to the United States from South Korea in 1973, has owned it since 1984. At 50 cones a day, he has cranked out half a million of them. They’re sweet and cold even if the soft-serve goop at Foster’s isn’t really ice cream, Lee conceded, but its low-end second cousin — ice milk.
The greatest challenge to a Foster’s employee was dunking a soft-serve cone upsidedown into the brown, vaguely chocolate-flavored goop to create a dipped cone. If the soft-serve was too soft, or the dipping took too long, the cone fell apart in the goop and you had to start all over. Doing it right was an art, Lee said. A bad dunker was an abomination to the profession.
Last of the worms
On one recent day, four pals from Palo Alto High School used their “prep” period to prep themselves up with milk shakes instead of prepping their algebra homework. Chris Jamison, a senior, said he liked Foster’s because his mom used to go there when she was a kid and he was being nostalgic by proxy.
And 9-year-old Ashford Gavin dropped by with his mom for a $3.19 Worm and Dirt Twister, which is a concoction made of vanilla goop, crushed cookies and gummy worms. He did not look happy when a reporter told him there would soon be no more Worm and Dirt Twisters and how did he feel about that?
“Bad,” he said, chewing the last of the worms, a red one.
No more nuggets
Lee said that his two remaining employees will find other jobs and that a couple of friends will take the refrigerators and other kitchen equipment off his hands. The soda pop distributor will take back the soda machine. He’s not ordering any more supplies. If the chicken nuggets run out, they run out.
Foster’s Freeze — which also calls itself Fosters Freeze and Fosters’ Freeze and proclaims itself to be “old fashion” when it should be old-fashioned — has 87 restaurants in California. At least until Wednesday.